For ardent collectors of Eltoniana only.
Straightforward biography of Sir Elton John, master of rock piano and camp performance.
Part Mona Lisa and part Mad Hatter, John astounded his parents with his child-prodigy skills at the piano at the age of 3 and, early on, took his talents and ran with them. Whether that adds up to his being “the most remarkably beloved rock and pop artist of rock history,” as Bego (Eat Like a Rock Star: More Than 100 Recipes From Rock 'n' Roll's Greatest, 2017, etc.) writes, is surely debatable. The remark is suggestive of the tossed-off way in which the author treats a subject who deserves deeper consideration. It’s inarguable that John turned his skills as a pianist and crowd-pleasing showman to materially impressive ends, earning and spending millions of dollars while working his way through trauma and “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Bego, who has authored biographies of Tina Turner, Cher, Billy Joel, and others, covers all the familiar ground: John’s lifelong musical partnership with Bernie Taupin; the dazzling costumes and improbable acrobatics onstage; the friendships with Lady Diana and, for that matter, Ru Paul; the decades of decadence; the generosity to charity; the dawning realization that his habits, as John put it, had made him “a piano-playing Elvis Presley”; and the willful recovery. An effort to tie the book to the unrelated movie Rocketman yields only the observation that Elton John can now add “cinematic hero” to his resume. Philip Norman’s Elton John (1992), albeit slightly updated in reissue, cuts off three decades ago; even so, it is by far the better book, digging deeper into John’s life and work. Bego’s book is filled with glancing chapter titles (“Glitter and Be Gay”) and painful turns of phrase (“Whatever he does, he does it one hundred and fifty percent, whether it is doing drugs, having wild parties, or alphabetizing his CD collection”). In the end, this biography is an exercise in superficiality, about as muscular as a handshake from Andy Warhol, who “would present his hand like he had just handed you a dead chicken.”
For ardent collectors of Eltoniana only.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313313-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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